Thursday, May 19, 2011

Malcolm X Insulted


Malcolm X Insulted 
In G2 Last Week Peter Tatchell Outed Malcolm X. To Mark The Great Man's 80th Birthday In This Way Was An Insult


    * Peter Akinti
    * The Guardian, Thursday 26 May 2005

We don't know where Malcolm X's political, spiritual or moral journey would have ended because he was murdered at the age of 39. But we witness the revolutionary nationalists who became his heirs. Peter Tatchell might like to picture an 80-year-old Malcolm X as a guest speaker at the Big Gay Out in Finsbury Park. But somehow I can't.

When I celebrate the life and achievements of Winston Churchill I don't think about his outrageous views on Jewish people trying to take over the world. If I think of Martin Luther King's dreams I don't distort them with thoughts of his alleged womanising. When I think of Van Gogh my thoughts aren't of a lunatic who cut off his ear to give to a prostitute, I think of a man who could paint a sunflower like no one else. When I listen to Marvin Gaye I don't think of him in a dress, stockings and suspenders.

I'm not pointing to failings, rather at unfolding complexities in people's lives. So, Malcolm X had a complex life, OK. But to look back at it and to remember him on his 80th birthday as a male prostitute is just wrong.

When I finished reading Tatchell's shocking Ode to Malcolm X last week, I picked myself off the floor and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some black people dismiss him as a racist and I could too. But I am comforted by his writings on the "uses of great men", by the thought that "Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds", even though I know that in 1850 he certainly wasn't writing for anyone who looks or thinks like me.

Malcolm X will always stand out among the greatest of men. And if fantasising about him getting a blow-job is your thing, then good luck to you. For the rest of us, Malcolm X remains a serious political figure not to be confused with the likes of Beenie Man and I can't think of a more inappropriate person to write about him on his 80th birthday than Tatchell.

Malcolm was called the angriest black man in America because he taught us that non-violence was a tactical option, not a sacred dogma. If he had read G2 on the morning of his birthday I'm pretty sure a frown would have appeared on that handsome face; he would have bitten his bottom lip, as he liked to, and he would have considered his options.

Let us not get anything twisted about Malcolm X. We remember him always for occupying himself with one thing throughout his short political life. One thing steadfast and unquestionable: the liberation of blacks, all blacks, by any means.

Any group of black men needs Tatchell as a champion like they need the whole world to bring back slavery. Everyone knows that most if not all black men (and women) were influenced by Malcolm X and I'm pretty sure black homosexuals are intelligent enough to interpret what they need to from Malcolm. So when he talked about freedom, self-expression and determination he was telling us to be whomever and whatever we want to be, despite societal pressures to conform to any definition of manhood.

That's the beauty of Malcolm X. He pushed the acceptable limits of black political thought. Do you see? Black men, gay or straight, already know what they need to know about the lives of Malcolm X and other prominent black men. Some of us quietly draw strength from great black men or white men every day and if my gay brother wants to behold a great black man as a gay icon, I'm pretty sure he is doing just that. It's not as if there are no black gay icons. Like Isaac Julian, whose acclaimed film Looking for Langston was slammed by black America. References to Langston Hughes's homosexuality almost saw the director sued by the Hughes estate. To his credit Julian, buoyed by the support of Professor Henry Louis Gates, rode the storm.

Tatchell's relentless and passé crusade to police black sexual politics, painting a picture of a lingering 60s battlefield between macho black reggae-singing nationalists and a silenced, besieged black homosexuality is clumsy. The truth is much more complicated. The battlelines do exist but are much more ambiguous and, I might suggest for the record, are done a disservice by Tatchell.

I wonder whether he will also find comfort in a quote from James Baldwin, who wrote in an essay published in 1980 that "it is of the utmost importance that I, the elder, do not allow myself to be put on the defensive. The young, no matter how loud they get, have no real desire to humiliate their elders and, if and when they succeed in doing so, are lonely, crushed, and miserable, as only the young can be".


    * guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011


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